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Notes from the Field

CYGNSS Launch Day Thoughts

December 15th, 2016 by Mary Morris

I’m currently writing from Hangar AE, where it all happened. While we wait to make contact with all of the CYGNSS satellites after launch, I’m going to attempt some coherent thoughts about the past few days.

You may already have been following what’s been going on since my last post, but I’ll give a brief summary from someone who experienced it more directly.

We tried to launch on Monday, but had to return to base after two aborts. It was frustrating to see weather-related violations go green as we turned to dealing with aircraft anomalies. Eventually, we had to abort on Monday morning due to an anomaly with the hydraulic pump associated with the release mechanism on the L-1011 aircraft. Even though we showed up excited and ready to rock and roll, things just didn’t go our way on Monday. One thing I’ve learned is that there is an unlimited amount of things that can go wrong. It’s very rare for things to go according to plan. Even though we had to abort, the flight team wasn’t too disappointed—this is how things usually go. Things didn’t go entirely smoothly after that, either. We ended up finding an issue with flight parameter data on Tuesday, delaying our next attempt until today, Thursday.

At 3 o’clock this morning I sat down at my console in the engineering backroom—the cheap, but more fun seats. Everyone “on console” has a headset that can be used to tune into many different communication channels. There is a whole channel dedicated for anomalies! We got there at 3 am because there is a whole binder full of steps to complete before we could launch. In addition to all of the audio we could tune into, there were many video feeds and displays of housekeeping data. Talk about information overload! It was easy to stay awake on a few hours of sleep with all of those stimuli in front of me. The adrenaline also helped.

While we watched the feeds, we would keep track of the housekeeping data to make sure everything looked okay. We also had a video feed from the chase plane to keep tabs on the rocket. I remember everyone being absolutely glued to their screens in nervous anticipation as we watched the video of the Pegasus XL rocket launch. In the engineering backroom, I was joined with other engineers who were very excited to see CYGNSS launch so beautifully. Here is a photo of everyone while we watched the rocket launch:

The engineering backroom crew was excited about the CYGNSS launch finally happening.

After all of the headaches earlier in the week, it was bizarre how well everything went today. In a flash, all of the CYGNSS satellites were orbiting and the L-1011 aircraft returned safely. Here is a photo of me, which hopefully portrays how excited I was, even with just a few hours of sleep.

Happy to see CYGNSS satellites up in orbit, while watching the feeds in our back control room.

We’re also so happy for Prof. Ruf and the entire team that made CYGNSS happen. Immediately after we launched, Prof. Ruf was bombarded by interviewers who wanted his take on the success of the mission.

While we had some post-launch down time, before we could communicate with the spacecraft, a beaming Prof. Ruf is interviewed in Hangar AE after the CYGNSS satellites were deployed.

A few hours after launch, we were able to start communicating with the spacecraft, but I’ll save a separate blog post for that topic since it was absolutely fascinating. Stay tuned and go CYGNSS!